You guys could eliminate one (I suspect major) source of confusion by not printing the numbers in decimal and reading them back in from character strings.
You can read/write exact hexadecimal 64-bit floating-point binary numbers. or you can write them out as <sign>X <exact integer, written in any base you choose> X 2^<exact integer> without any error or possible confusion. There are few people who will claim their numerical library functions provide correctly rounded results always. Read about the "table-maker's dilemma". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#The_table-maker.27s_dilemma The fact that rounding of + and * is done right is irrelevant. The fact that some computers are doing 80-bit intermediate calculations vs 64-bit might be relevant. But then if you want them all to agree, you can knee-cap the 80-bit machines, so they will be the same as 64-bit. Java originally required that. Instead of flailing around switching Solaris compilers and what-have- you why not try figuring out whether the bug is printing or computing, or even a bug at all. RJF -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
